Cheat Seeking Missiles: Israel Wins An Information War Battle

This is how you take on the UN, Hezbollah and your international critics who are waging an information war against you:

Israel has released these and more classified photos, prisoner interrogation records and other sensitive materials that shame the UN et. al., for condemning Israel's attacks in residential neighborhoods during last summer's war. Clearly, Israel had little choice but to attack the neighborhoods, which Hezbollah forced into the role of being the front in the battle.

The story ran three-columns just below the fold in today's NYTimes, a paper that serves the city that serves not just the UN's market, but also one of the largest Jewish populations in the world. And that wasn't by accident; it was a strategic leak:

Israel says that it tried to avoid civilians, but that Hezbollah fired from civilian areas, itself a war crime, which made those areas legitimate targets.

In a new report, an Israeli research group says Hezbollah stored weapons in mosques, battled Israelis from inside empty schools, flew white flags while transporting missiles and launched rockets near United Nations monitoring posts.

The detailed report on the war was produced by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies, a private research group headed by Reuven Erlich, a retired colonel in military intelligence, who worked closely with the Israeli military.

An advance copy was given to The New York Times by the American Jewish Congress, which has itself fought against the use of “human shields,” provided consultation and translated the study. (emphasis added)

Against these photos of rocket-launchers in civilian neighborhoods, Hezbollah's rebuttal sounds like, to use the diplomatic term, a steaming pile of horse manuer:

“We tried to avoid having to fight among civilian areas, but when Israeli troops entered villages, we were automatically forced to fight them from inside these villages to defend it,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on military matters.

You fight troops in neighborhoods with rifles and grenade launchers, not rocket launchers. And neither is very good at fighting images from cameras mounted in the noses of missiles, which Israel included in its info campaign:

In video from July 23, a truck with a multi-barreled missile launcher, presumably from Hezbollah, is parked in a street, sandwiched between residential buildings. The video was transmitted from an Israeli missile approaching the truck. The screen goes fuzzy as the missile slams into the target.
In another video, from a Lebanese village, rockets are seen being fired from a launcher on the back of a truck. The truck then drives a short distance and disappears inside a building. Seconds later, the building itself disappears under a cloud of smoke from an Israeli bomb.

That's fighting an info war! And a special hat-tip to the Israelis for saying that this asymetrical warfare they faced in Lebanon and Gaza is no different from what we're facing in Iraq.